Winning Ideas Sought

Fifty-six years ago, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 and it has remained a best-selling book and is considered a literary classic ever since.
The National Endowment for the Arts notes this “gripping story at once disturbing and poetic, Bradbury takes the materials of pulp fiction and transforms them into a visionary parable of a society gone awry, in which firemen burn books and the state suppresses learning. Meanwhile, the citizenry sits by in a drug-induced and media-saturated indifference.”What do YOU think? Write and submit a paper on the relevance of the book Fahrenheit 451 in 2009 for a Student Symposium and win a prize and publication of your work.
The Symposium will be held in the library on Friday, October 23, 2009 from 11am-noon

A Student Symposium is a conference for students to present their academic work in a formal conference setting to an audience of students, faculty and other supporters. It is open to all SBCC students and will accept proposals from any discipline. Five winners will be selected from submissions. Winner papers will be published online and prizes will be awarded.
This Symposium is sponsored by the SBCC Luria Library and SBCC’s Great Books Curriculum and, as part of the “The Big Read” program of the Santa Barbara Public Library. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to revitalize the role of literary reading in American popular culture. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 NEA report, identified a critical decline in reading for pleasure among American adults. The Big Read addresses this issue by bringing communities together to read, discuss, and celebrate books and writers from American and world literature.